Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Still Justified 70 Years Later

Aug. 6 marks one of America’s most important anniversaries, remarkable for what happened on that date in 1945 and for what did not happen subsequently.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That dramatic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week of the Aug. 9 detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki.